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The Trust Project is a collaboration among news organizations around the world. Its goal is to create strategies that fulfill journalism’s basic pledge: to serve society with a truthful, intelligent and comprehensive account of ideas and events.

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About The Walrus

The Walrus was founded in 2003. As a registered charity, we publish independent, fact-based journalism in The Walrus and at thewalrus.ca; we produce national, ideas-focused events, including our flagship series The Walrus Talks; and we train emerging professionals in publishing and non-profit management. The Walrus is invested in the idea that a healthy society relies on informed citizens.

The Walrus publishes content nearly every day on thewalrus.ca and ten times a year in print. Our editorial priorities include politics and world affairs, health and science, society, the environment, law and justice, Indigenous issues, business and economics, the arts (including music, dance, film and television, literature, and fiction and poetry), and Canada’s place in the world.

Based in Toronto, The Walrus currently has a full-time editorial staff of fifteen, and we work with writers and artists across Canada and the world. Our masthead can be found here.

Ownership, Funding, and Grants

The Walrus is operated by the charitable, non-profit Walrus Foundation, which is overseen by a board of directors, with the support of a national advisory committee and an educational review committee. The foundation’s revenue comes from multiple sources, including advertising sales, sponsorships, circulation, donations, government grants, and events. More than 1,500 donors and sponsors supported The Walrus in 2017.

Ethics Policy

The Walrus is committed to reporting that is fair, accurate, complete, transparent, and independent.

Fact-Checking Standards
Stories that appear in The Walrus and thewalrus.ca are fact-checked. Our fact-checkers verify everything from broad claims made by authors to small details, such as dates and the spelling of names. Fact-checking records at The Walrus are archived in storage once a story is published.

The Walrus counts on its writers to make independent evaluations of difficult topics. The best journalism—no matter how descriptive, opinion driven, or narrative driven—is based on facts, and those facts should be clearly presented in the story. The Walrus is committed to ensuring the validity of an argument and finding balance between various perspectives on any given issue, while keeping in mind the reliability and motivations of individual sources.

Corrections
As soon as The Walrus is made aware of an error, fact-checkers will review the statement in question. Any needed corrections will be noted online at the bottom of the article—and in the next print issue, if the error originally appeared in print. The correction will reference the original error and supply the correct information and the date.
If you notice an error in something published by The Walrus, please send us a message at web@thewalrus.ca with the subject line “Correction.”

Veiled Sources
The Walrus allows the use of alternate names for real people only in cases involving legitimate safety concerns or where personal privacy must be protected for serious reasons. If the name of a subject or source is already public and associated with specific events, concealment may not be justified. We will be diligent in explaining a veiled source’s credibility, as much as possible without disclosing their identity, and in explaining why they have remained anonymous.

Editorial Independence
Journalism at The Walrus is produced independently of commercial or political interests. The editorial staff and writers do not accept gifts, including paid travel, in order to avoid any conflict of interest or appearance thereof. When a writer relies on an organization for access to an event or product, we are transparent about the relationship and note it within the relevant work. We also cite potential conflicts of interest—and, where applicable, credit funding sources—on the same page as the relevant work.

Contributors or writers are contractually obligated to disclose practices that may deviate from the ethics policy of The Walrus to our editorial team.

Editorial Standards
The Walrus maintains a style guide, which is regularly reviewed and updated to reflect current conversations about culture and terminology.

For any situation not covered by this policy, we refer to the Ethics Guidelines of the Canadian Association of Journalists.

Diversity Statement

Inclusiveness is at the heart of thinking and acting as journalists—and supports the educational mandate of The Walrus. Race, class, generation, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and geography all affect point of view. The Walrus believes that reflecting societal differences in reporting leads to better, more nuanced stories and a better-informed community.

The Walrus is committed to employment equity and diversity.

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All the explorers I worshipped in high school turned out to be hacks. The Polos, the Columbuses, the Franklins of the world were less seekers of truth or beauty, as I’d naively believed based on romanticized accounts of their exploits, than servants of commerce or conquest. These men—they were almost always men—“discovered” lands that existed quite vividly for those already living in them, and they evangelized the sort of “progress” that overruns everyone and everything in its path. I used to want to be an explorer when I grew up, having misunderstood what that meant. The identity crisis was mine, but exploration itself is overdue for an exegesis. Does an enterprise with such a troubled past deserve a future?

Exploration has always been about the extraction of resources: gold, spices, fur, oil, or fame for being “first.” As such, the most competent explorers at work today are robots: the satellites, space probes, and rovers mindlessly charting the places humans can’t go and, in some cases, the places we can—and already have. Headlines recently trumpeted the discovery, based on a vast guano stain spotted from space, of an Adélie penguin supercolony. The penguins were hardly a revelation to those who frequent the Danger Islands of Antarctica, including Canadian Geoff Green, founder of the educational foundation Students on Ice. As proof, he shared a video, from seven years earlier, of students taking photos of the teeming, tuxedoed birds.

Precedent only counts, it seems, if documented in a certain way and by certain sanctioned elites. In 2013, some members of the Moose Cree First Nation in northern Ontario were similarly indignant when media announced that Adam Shoalts, a “professional explorer and adventurer,” as he calls himself, “discovered” waterfalls in their traditional territory (when he accidentally canoed over them, no less). In his biography for talks and events, Shoalts asserts that he “has, literally, changed the map of Canada,” referring to how charts of the Again River were modified to include new symbols for waterfalls and to adjust the placement of some symbols for rapids. But is updating maps with minor landmarks really the exalted end of all our exploring? Does a more detailed chart of a place, as T. S. Eliot famously put it, let us know it for the first time? Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “On Exactitude in Science,” which elaborates on a concept from a Lewis Carroll novel, describes a civilization so obsessed with cartographic accuracy that its maps pullulate in scale and resolution until they coincide, detail for detail, with the world. “Succeeding generations,” Borges remarks, “came to judge a map of such magnitude cumbersome.”

Literature offers epiphanies no explorer’s chart can yield. If industrial geologists and other professional explorers have defined modern-day exploration on their own terms—as the science of acquisition or an exercise in nostalgia—nothing prevents you and me from envisioning it instead as an art, a pursuit whose outcomes are appreciated not for technical precision so much as beauty or emotional heft, the change in consciousness they provoke. By this measure, the Voyager spacecraft mission, launched in 1977, is meaningful less for the new facts it has amassed and more for the “pale blue dot” photograph of the Earth made puny by its cosmic context. “In our obscurity, in all this vastness,” observed astronomer and writer Carl Sagan, “there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

The world is worn thin with our looking, our wanting to know, which is too often a pretext for wanting to possess and control. So forget planting flags and leaving footprints. Let explorers, in the historic sense of the word, go extinct. The future of exploration requires stripping the enterprise of its ego, its colonial cruelties, its compulsions to name and claim—stripping it of everything but a sense of wonder. Consider Eliot’s other, less quoted, take on the venture:

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion.

The end of all our exploring, then, is not knowledge but kinship—a deepened sense of connection to the planet and to each other, earthlings every one, even the penguins. At stake is not simply the soul of exploration but the well-being of our world. If we don’t collectively wake up to our shared fragility and fate, and change our ways, none of our maps will matter.

About the Author(s)

Kate Harris (@kateonmars) lives in an off-grid cabin in Atlin, BC. Her first book, Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road, was published in January.

Wenting Li (wentingli.com) has had her work published in the Globe and Mail, Canadian Living, and The Feathertale Review.

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